Recently in travel Category

This is a 90 minute DVD about the backpackers' life. Lifted from Cool Tools:

Don't watch this documentary unless you are ready to quit your job. It's about the joys and woes of long-term traveling. It's impossible to watch this fun film and not confront the fact that you are here instead of there, out on the road, soaking up the mysteries of the world, with all-you-can-eat $3 dinners and $5 rooms, backpacking around the world for a year, as the filmmaker himself did. This kind of vagabonding is more a state of mind than a state of motion. Something weird happens when you travel longer than 10 days, and that wonderful transformation (which no one can explain to their family when they return) is what this superbly written, fabulously edited, deeply personal and wonderfully likeable documentary is all about.

BedandBreakfast has a database of 28,000 B&Bs worldwide, including nearly 6,000 that can be booked through the site -- with photos and expanded descriptions.

Unusual Hotels of the World lists 127 lighthouses, prisons, caves, and other unique places to spend the night.

There has recently been a minor scandal in the tourist book publication business because of the admission of a Lonely Planet editor that he did not always go to the places he described in his books.

Lonely Planet scandal

Thomas Kohnstamm says that he was in San Francisco at the time. "They didn't pay me enough to go to Colombia," he told The Australian Herald Sun. So he "got the information from a chick I was dating who was an intern in the Colombian Consulate".
[...]
Speaking from his home in Seattle, Kohnstamm told The Times that his comments had been misrepresented. He denied inventing content. However, he stood by his original argument that overstretched and underfunded freelance travel writers, whose recommendations are relied upon by generations of travellers, cannot possibly visit every budget hotel and jungle outpost they are asked to.

Death of the guidebook: lost in a cutthroat world

Guidebook publishers will deny this, but the travel publishing industry is bound to exploit demand for what is widely seen as a glamour job - travel and get paid for it. But with so many competing guidebook series, many titles do not generate sales revenue that justifies the legwork that results in genuine personal recommendations. Most publishers who make claims to the contrary are being disingenuous.

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Check these sites before traveling to other countries. Local conditions may make them unsafe.

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[SideStep] One of my favorites. Good user interface.
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[FareCast] Interesting niche: predicts whether fare will rise or fall, allowing you to decide to buy now or later.
[LowFares]
[BookingBuddy]

This is a favorite geeky travel link. It allows you to determine the great circle distance between any two airports or just any two points by latitude and longitude. Useful for settling the kinds of bets we have here: which is farther from New York, A or B?

[Great circle mapper]

Northwest lists a number of common airplanes and the seating arrangement on each. It's good for Northwest and other planes, I expect.

[Northwest seat map]